Above – a dance party from Tuesday night’s show at Lena’s in Alexandria, VA. Joyous times betwixt the rains!
September MIGHT kick my ass. In a good way I guess, but I reached a kind of critical mass of things not fitting in my brain yesterday and I’m trying to get right in my head after a night of sangria and nightmares.
The GIG was good. The PARTY was good. All the gigs recently have been a joy, frankly, but last night Rowan saved our collective asses (or at least saved MY ass from having to run back to Baltimore for my mixer’s absurdly proprietary cable) by running back home and grabbing HIS mixer, because… because somehow I grabbed THIS cable rather than THAT cable… from there it was kind of a cascade failure of tech and by the time we got started, 15 minutes late, absolutely nothing was for wear other than my nerves but – I hate being late. I think I’ve said that somewhere.
In any case, I really need a backup mixer so that I can get the QSC repaired – and I was really impressed with Rowan’s Behringer X Air thingie – in a way that I hadn’t been impressed with it a couple of years ago, so now I’m looking at picking one of THOSE up… sigh. I’d foolishly thought recently that I had nothing else that I wanted to purchase…
Last night I dreamt that I was being lead through the halls of some sort of governmentish building, labyrinthine rooms – my old boss Jerry and the president of Focus Music were taking me on a tour while I was waiting for my spot at an open mic being held in the basement. The basement room was a crowded, low-slung space, yellow light and smoke giving it an almost solid atmosphere and I was walking around with Mark Rooney’s Alvarez (I was playing that at the party last night)… I signed up and set the guitar down in the hallway because I didn’t want to take it as we wandered around and then it was just room after room of antiquated computers and dusty waiting rooms. The dusty waiting room all had old wood and canvas chairs and low coffee tables covered in brightly-coloured aviation magazines with jets and rockets on the covers… and each space that Herb and Jerry would walk me into really was just another office space, cubicles and old greenscreen computers… at one point we passed through a strange blackbox theatre where Heather was doing something that I recognized as “performative meditation”… she was ranting and screaming and wearing a fright wig so she could pull out her hair without damaging her professional appearance and there was a doctor in a labcoat taking notes on a clipboard as she screamed and pseudo-self-mutilated. The doctor turned to us and hushed us as we hurried through into yet another waiting room. The atmosphere was hushed but Jerry and Herb kept saying things like “oh, and you’ll think THIS one’s REALLY cool” as we’d enter yet another humming, dimly-lit room.
Sunday involved a lot of moving tents around pre and post gig. T’was a good ballet. Nothing much to this photo, just a way to remember a good night of chatting with my friends for hours… Something that doesn’t happen enough… Mark Rooney swapping tales. Dance of the flaming marshmallows…
As we rounded back to the hallway where the guitar was suddenly Herb and Jerry swerve in front of me and stop cold – “what do you remember about all those rooms?!! All the jet fighters. You remember all the rockets on the magazines, right?” And proceeded to ream me out because OUR products, OUR shows (I guess meaning Glovia, Fujitsu and Focus Music) should be on the front covers of all those magazines and it was because my photography and graphic design skills were so subpar that they weren’t. They made it QUITE clear that if I’d get off my ass and make better photos, better blurbs, better press releases – we’d be on the front page of all of those magazines.
I woke up really unsettled and retelling it you don’t have to delve too deep into rob’s subconscious to know what I’m thinking.
In other news what is UP with google’s algorithms? I stupidly continue to use their news aggregator because it’s easy on my phone – but it frequently edges into right wing propaganda and sometimes downright white supremacist stories (I think I first noticed this when what SEEMED to be a pretty sedate if whiny story about Battlestar Galactica suddenly veered dramatically to gripe about the “overdue suicide of the mulatto girl”). I prune the stories, block the sites, and it’s fine for a couple of weeks and then it’s back. And now in suggested search terms (before I start typing) it’s recommending Trump bumper stickers and donations for 2024… like… if google is making that assumption of me simply because I’m a white male over the age of 40 and serving up what it thinks my preferences must be, what fucking hope IS there for the world?!